Roots and Wings
by musicforlife101
Summary: Inspired by the line from Sweet Home Alabama "You can't have roots and wings." Andrew and Margret are exactly what the other needs, roots and wings. Rating to be safe. A backstory exploration.
1. Wings

**Author's Note:** I will admit to being hopelessly in love with this movie, but I'm not sure I could ever do it justice with my writing. I got the urge to write this though and I couldn't help myself. It took me no time to right this first part, but the second chapter (companion piece I suppose) took a lot longer to figure out on paper. Anyway, I felt this site was particularly lacking in fanfics for The Proposal, though what's here is overall quite amazing. So here I am posting my small contribution to the pot. And if this is well received I may be inclined to write something else later.

**Disclaimer: **I do not in any way own The Proposal, any publicly recognizable characters, such as Andrew Paxton or Margret Tate, nor am I in any way affiliated with the owners/producers of the film. However, I would really love to have a Ryan Reynolds and/or and Sandra Bullock of my own (especially Ryan Reynolds) and Christmas is right around the corner, sorta. =]

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Andrew Paxton was a young boy the first time he'd wished to escape his isolated Alaskan home and overbearing father. While the other boys his age were busy collecting and trading baseball cards, he was devouring book after book. A voracious reader since he'd learned to understand the written word, Andrew kept a collection of his favorites beside his bed. It changed as he grew older, moving from chapter books to short novels to Penguin classics.

By the time he was in his teens, his favorites consisted of things like _Don Quixote_, _Huck Finn_, _Dubliners_, and _Waiting for Godot_. The latter he felt particularly connected to. Two guys waiting by a road for a third to come meet them but never showing up. The quest that doesn't happen. It felt like his life. Stuck in one place, waiting in vain for the chance at something better.

His friends teased him for his summer reading plans. Every year he would make a list of books to read over the summer with one author for each letter of the alphabet. The guys he went to school with laughed, but Gert never did. Either way, it couldn't possibly be worse than his father's obvious contempt. Joe Paxton couldn't have been more transparent about his opinions on his son's chosen passion. But it was his method of mental escape. He was Icarus and books were his wings. He wanted those wings, metaphorical or physical, to escape and his didn't care how he got them.

The first time Andrew had read Twain's _Huck Finn_ he was twelve and had gone out to the tool shed (more like a tool house) and got an ax far too large for him. He went to the stand of trees behind the house and attempted to cut one down. Chuck, a friend of his from school, had come over and stopped him before he had hurt himself. As he explained to Chuck, he was just trying to get a big enough log to make a canoe so he could escape. He just wanted to float down the river like Huck and Jim, except he had an ocean instead of a river and it wouldn't take him where he wanted to go.

Within a month, the loggers had cut down a tree for his family to cut up for firewood and it didn't take long for Andrew to make off with a good portion of it. Over that summer, and each following year, he had taken to carving out the inside of the canoe with an ax and a hatchet. Every full-blown argument would end in him taking out his frustrations on that canoe, trying desperately to escape, followed by a cool down with whichever of his alphabet reading list he was working on at the time.

Even while he was dating Gert, Andrew wanted to escape. That was why he'd asked her to elope to New York with him. When she'd said no, he simply packed his bags and left anyway. It was finally his chance to escape the suffocating disdain on his father and the overall suffocating feeling of Sitka. There was no way he was giving up his dream for a girl, especially not one that was going to encase his feet in cement and toss him back into the inescapable waters of his hometown and watch as he floundered and gasped for air. No, it was time for him to be going.

New York was everything he'd hoped it would be and nothing like Sitka. At first he worked a lot of part-time jobs as he tried to bolster enough of a resume in the city to get a job at a publishing company. When he finally did, it wasn't what he expected. He was answering phones and doing messenger runs to other floors and offices. It wasn't much, but it was a foot in the door and for the first time in his twenty-something years, he didn't want to escape. He had no desire to run away and he actually found himself putting down the dreaded "roots."

He started renting a small studio apartment that he was filling with his books and he'd even started dating again. Slowly but surely he was working his way up the ranks at the independent publishing company he was working for. It was a shock when the company went under and Andrew suddenly found himself with a stapler of his own, but no job.

It took almost no time for him to pick up a job at a bookstore and a weekend bartending gig to supplement his measly paycheck. Of course, he was only waiting for a better job to come along. This wasn't the side of New York he wanted to be a part of and the only part of his day he didn't want to escape from was the time he spent in the beautiful second hand bookstore he worked in, occasionally falling in love with another book.

When Andrew finally landed his position at Colden Books as Margret Tate's assistant, he thought it was his chance. Surely she would notice his potential and ability and promote him as soon as she found a replacement. But, that didn't happen. For three long years he waited for an escape from the hell of being her underling. It didn't come.

Although he complained with the rest of his coworkers and often agreed she was a terrorist, in all honesty, Andrew didn't want to escape Margret Tate. Sure she was bossy and told him what to do, but as his boss that was her job. She was crazy and a terrorist and she had no problem humiliating him. If he was being truthful with himself (which wasn't very often and hardly ever with anyone else), it was the midnight Tampax runs that got him.

They said, "I need someone. I need you. I depend on you." They said words Margret could never tell him. She trusted him and relied on him and obviously liked him if she kept him for three years. Though he sometimes ignored it, Andrew was intelligent enough to know she liked him if she _wanted_ him as her assistant. She didn't want to lose him. And while the stagnant, and somewhat unappealing, position was far less than ideal, it was also somewhere he wanted to be. He didn't want to escape the totalitarian thumb of Margret Tate because he felt needed, wanted and silently appreciated. This was a marked improvement from Sitka, Alaska.

When Margret had forced him to marry her he felt suddenly suffocated again, like he had fallen into a freezing cold lake and couldn't get his head about water. As the weekend wore on, things got a little better and then his dad had to stick his opinions in where they didn't belong. It was the first time he'd wanted to escape that badly. Dragging out the old canoe and his good friends and ax and hatchet, Andrew set to his usual remedy. The barely repressed anger and frustration rolled off him in waves throughout the evening.

That is until Margret managed to show him that it wasn't so bad after all. They were laughing together and he realized that night and the following two days that she made him not want to escape. It was the most content he'd been in Sitka since he'd realized there was a whole world out there and his father wasn't in it. He was happy with Margret; she made him happy. She made him crazy, but also happy. Most importantly, he was himself with Margret and she didn't mind who that was, Maybe _Margret_ was his escape.

Then he was running, running after her. For the first time in his life he was running _to_ someone rather than from them. And he was glad that someone was Margret. He wouldn't need that canoe anymore. _She_ would be his escape from the world.

He would be her roots and she would be his wings.

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So there is the first half of this little piece. Please leave a review if you feel so inclined.


	2. Roots

**A/N:** For some reason, I though I had already posted this. Apparently not so I'm posting it now. Anyway, I'm going to leave the fic in progress until I decide whether or not to write a follow up chapter. If you have an opinion on that, I'd love to read it in a review or message.

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Margaret Tate hadn't always been so guarded. Once upon a time, when she was very young, she had been a happy child with friends and parents and books. She could remember her sweet sixteen, her first boyfriend. She had been so happily connected to the world around her.

She didn't hear the groaning metal or smell the sticky, metallic smell of the blood. But she imagined it, that summer night when she was all alone. No one had come to dry her tears or hold her while she sobbed. Not her boyfriend or her friends. Her entire life was uprooted that day and nothing was ever the same. The funeral she paid for was beautiful and the flowers filled the whole house, blanketing it with the sickly sweet smell of people trying to pay off their grief or guilt. She could never look at a Calla Lily the same way ever again.

After both parents were buried, Margaret, or Maggie as she was known then, threw out every floral arrangement. For a little while following the funeral, she lived off the life insurance. Then she got a job waitressing at a diner three blocks away. The house was paid for so she only had to make enough money for basic living expenses. It got her through high school, which she graduated from third in her class. She would have been Valedictorian had she not spent thirty hours a week working.

In those two years, she grew her wings. There was nothing keeping her in Toronto anymore, no family, no friends. Just a house and a dead-end job. So she left Canada for New York University on a scholarship and with a student visa. Margaret rented out her parents' house and started creating the new her. Not a single friend she made in college knew her as Maggie. It was always Margaret. She had casual relationships, not long-term commitments. She controlled every part of her life she could. And she avoided putting down roots at all.

During her first few years in the business, Margaret bounced from one publishing company to the next. When she landed an editorial position, she stayed put and slowly let her wings rest a while. They were always on alert, though, ready to fly away, despite the fact that she had risen to editor-in-chief of Colden Books. It was never because she didn't want to be happy in one place; in fact, she desperately wanted to feel safe enough to put down roots again, but she couldn't figure out how. She had already spent so long alone that she had become quite comfortable that way.

Even buying her apartment at Central Park West wasn't enough for her to feel settled down. It felt like...like a betrayal to this beautiful apartment she'd come to love so much in the five times she had asked the realtor to bring her back to it. Margaret didn't feel ready to own something again. It had been a decade since she'd sold her parents' house in Canada, her last root in Toronto, and she wasn't sure she had enough room in her still broken heart for more failed commitment.

Under the advisement (and not so gentle prodding) of her real estate agent, Margaret did buy her dream apartment and set about making it her own. They both thought she would be less inclined to move again if it felt homey and was exactly how she wanted it. The entire space became airy and light, comfortable but more connected to the sky than the city. Now though, it wasn't her reservations that kept her from using her home to ground her life. She had simply forgotten. Over the almost twenty years she had been on her own, she had forgotten how to feel connected, forgotten what it felt like to be connected.

Margaret's life consisted mostly of work and she didn't understand how anyone else had a constant life apart from that. This had driven away ten assistants in four years. She held little hope for Andrew Paxton. When he arrived Monday morning, before her, and was already dressed in a suit and tie, she was pleasantly surprised. He showed an amazing work ethic from the first day she met him and he had the potential to be an amazing editor one day. But not today, perhaps tomorrow. She said this to herself every day for the first two months. By that time she knew she couldn't afford to lose him as an assistant.

It was a Friday night two months after Andrew had been hired and it was nearly midnight when he walked into her office with a manuscript he'd finished. Instead of the prim and proper boss he was used to during normal business hours, he found Margaret with her heels (Christian Louboutin, he noticed absently) lying abandoned under her desk and her blazer tossed haphazardly atop a stack of manuscripts on the desk. She had one arm around her stomach and the other curled around the manuscript she was reading, fingers poised to turn the page. Margaret Tate looked exhausted and extremely uncomfortable. She had been toeing the line between her usual unhappiness and severe discomfort all day, but now her defenses were down.

When she noticed him, she immediately tried to straighten herself up and look more professional. The sudden movement caused her more pain and she curled up again. He asked what was the matter but she only replied that it was nothing he would understand. Having had the same girlfriend for nearly six years, he did actually understand. Even though she insisted there was nothing he could do for her, he was far more stubborn and she eventually caved, listing only two things: Tampax and Midol.

He had unknowingly sealed his own fate that night when he returned twenty minutes later with exactly what she asked for and no embarrassed flush. After swallowing her pills and using the bathroom, Margaret returned to her office only to find Andrew tidying up. If his Tampax run for her hadn't been enough to ensure him a long career as her assistant, his gentle but insistent manner as he took away her manuscript, made her put on her jacket and shoes, and handed her purse to her definitely was. Then he walked her out of the building, hailed a cab and sent her home with a stern glare that warned her against returning over the weekend.

Since that night, Margaret had begun taking on projects around her apartment. Slowly, it was starting to feel grounded the same way Andrew made her feel. It had been a very long time since she'd last felt like that, but her assistant brought her down a level and reminded her that she was still human. He reminded her that she still needed people, no matter how independent she wanted to be.

When she was about to be deported, it was his phrasing that gave her the idea and she couldn't have picked a better victim if she'd tried. Sometime in his three years as her underling she had become attached to him, used to seeing him every morning, and legitimately worried about what Bob might have done. Bob Spaulding was the grudge-holding type and he probably would have fired Andrew on the spot.

During their adventure in Alaska, she realized just how empty and untethered her life really had become. Margaret was acutely aware of his family and its issues, but it painfully, horribly reminded her of what she hadn't known she missed. Andrew and his family filled that void and she couldn't bear to hurt them and lie to them any longer. She was too afraid of uprooting their lives the same way hers was. She was running away from it all, hoping it would hurt them less.

Then Andrew was standing in the middle of the office panting, coming for her, needing her. For the first time in a long time, she wanted to put down roots, wanted to hang on to someone instead of some _job_. But she was scared, still terrified of screwing up the life of the man she loved. He wanted it, though; he wanted to help her put down roots. And she would never want anyone else. He was the only one she ever really trusted and he would never do her wrong. He would ground her, keep her tied to a family, his family, their family.

He would be her roots and she would be his wings.

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So there it is. Please leave a review if you feel so inclined. Thanks for reading!


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